PwC India, HighRadius Alliance aid the office of the CFO to embrace autonomous finance

PwC India and HighRadius, the Autonomous Finance Software Platform for Order to Cash, Treasury Management, and Record to Report, have entered a strategic alliance to bring the power of autonomous technology and digital transformation across finance and accounting business processes.

The new alliance will bring together HighRadius’s data-driven Autonomous Finance platform and PwC’s proven expertise in driving transformation for the office of the CFO. This will give Finance the confidence to embrace advanced technology and deliver enable faster delivery of business outcomes.

PwC India and HighRadius Alliance Will Help the Office of the CFO to Embrace Autonomous Finance

“HighRadius is a great addition to PwC’s expanding alliance ecosystem aimed at empowering the office of the CFO to be a strategic driver of business in an increasingly complex business environment. Our combined value proposition with HighRadius helps us deliver sustained outcomes for our clients by unlocking efficiencies in their working capital and treasury operations as well as digitizing the invoice to cash cycle end-to-end”, Ritu Rekha, Leader - Finance Transformation, PwC India.

“With so much hype around AI, Big Data, and RPA, you have surely wondered if the real business value is behind all of the hype. The answer is yes and no. You could choose to build in-house AI with an army of data scientists and end up with a science experiment, or you could deploy ready-to-use domain-specific AI use-cases for specific business problems and start seeing business results in under six months,” said HighRadius Founder & CEO Sashi Narhari. “At HighRadius, we strongly believe that traditional B2B software as we know it will be dead in the next decade and will be replaced by domain-specific, data-driven, and intelligent software.”

The need for CFOs to experiment more broadly with AI

Finance teams are being asked to do more for less and financial scorekeeping is no longer the core responsibility. Successful finance teams must operate as strategic business partners, bringing data-driven insights gleaned from advanced analytics and predictive modeling.

According to research that was shared during the Gartner CFO and Finance Executive Conference in June 2022, the experimenters - CFOs who experiment more broadly with Artificial Intelligence and advanced technologies (piloting 8+ projects per year) - are more likely to succeed in comparison to the ‘dabblers’ who only pilot about four projects per year.

Gartner also advised to let go of the archaic adage of “starting small to avoid costly failures" and instead recommended that CFOs evaluate the project's long-term ROI by considering the cost of inaction six months from now. Per Gartner, this exercise is an easy way to overcome the fear of increased experimentation and build a realistic ROI model.